Kick Out The Jams: Ip Man 4: Finale film review

Ip Man 4: Finale

I finished grading this morning so this afternoon I treated myself to a screening of Ip Man 4: Finale, the final installment of the popular series about the legendary Wing Chun grandmaster. It’s not the greatest movie but it was a decent way to pass a couple hours.

The film’s title fittingly features the number four, a homonym for death in Chinese, as the movie opens with Ip Man being diagnosed with throat cancer. He’s also dealing with his rebellious teenage son who just got kicked out of school for brawling. When Ip Man’s student Bruce Lee sends him an invite to a tournament that he’s appearing in in the US he uses the opportunity to scout for a stateside school for his son to attend.

Curiously wide, Ip Man 4: Finale

As with many Hong Kong movies supposedly set in the US, many of the small details are off. The film is set in San Francisco but is obviously shot somewhere else. The streets of Chinatown are curiously wide and lacking in hills and I swear the gates of the army barracks reminded me of the Beijing Film Academy. Curiously, although most of the dialog is in Cantonese, one of the major supporting characters speaks Mandarin and his daughter is played by a hapa actress, Vanda Margraf. (We never see her mom in the film so who knows, maybe dad had a German wife). The evil and racist white schoolgirl bully (who is literally named Becky) and her mother occasionally slip up in their American accents. One of the bad guys, a karate master, seems to be played by an Asian actor despite having a Western name. And the main bad guy, a racist Marine officer, is a complete caricature. It doesn’t help that the actor playing him ruthlessly chews the scenery.

Serene, Donnie Yen and Wu Yue, Ip Man 4: Finale

Nonetheless, Donnie Yen manages to make the film much more than just another movie about Chinese underdogs versus oppressive white overlords. Ip Man is the role that he was born to play and he imbues the martial arts master with a convincing grace and presence. In a lot of his earlier roles Donnie tended toward an annoying arrogance but Ip Man’s somber humility keeps that in check, and his serene reserve effectively contrasts with his explosive martial arts moves. The action choreography by Yuen Woo Ping is top-notch, including a great little bit with a glass lazy susan and a teacup. Much of the martial arts is wire-free and some of the hand-to-hand fighting is convincingly bone-crunching. Danny Chan reprises his role from Ip Man 3 as Bruce Lee and he’s fairly good at mimicking Bruce’s mannerisms, from swiping his nose with his thumb to his trademark swagger. Some of his more advanced fighting moves seem to be doubled but all in all he’s inoffensive in the role.

In an interesting example of how the ongoing protests in Hong Kong have touched every aspect of life in the city, pro-democracy demonstrators are boycotting this film due to producer Raymond Wong and Donnie Yen and Danny Chan’s pro-Beijing comments. The Hollywood Reporter notes,

Wong has made his pro-China stance known especially in recent years, having organized a fund for an anti-Occupy Central organization in 2014 and vocally criticized the democratically voted best film win of the politically controversial Ten Years at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2015, calling the movie’s triumph at the ceremony “a huge mistake” and “a joke” despite it being the consensus of film industry members. Yen, who played the eponymous character in the film series, shared the stage and sang with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a gala commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Hong Kong handover in 2017 and issued a statement early this year reasserting “the determination of the motherland” after his fans in China was outraged by his attendance of an event hosted by German clothing brand Philipp Plein, which was allegedly involved in an incident deemed “insulting” to China a dozen years ago. Meanwhile, Chan, who plays Bruce Lee in the latest movie, has been outspokenly supportive of the Hong Kong police, posting on social media that police should not “go easy on any [protesters]” nor “let anyone of them go.”

Due to the boycott the film has suffered at the Hong Kong box office, taking in just $660,000 in its first week of release and coming in second to the latest Star Wars movie.

December 29, 2019 at 3:53 am 2 comments